Investors often choose a conservative buy-and-hold strategy where you buy a stock or other security and you hang on to it for possibly years or sometimes decades. There is no question about that you can make money with this strategy when the overall market is bullish and all or most of your stocks are moving in an uptrend in your portfolio.

As you know the market moves in waves and the uptrend, the impulsive waves are followed by corrective waves when the market goes flat or often declines. So as the long-term market moves higher thru the impulsive and corrective waves there are times when you portfolio increases in value and sometimes decreases in value.

This could make some investors very nervous as they see their portfolio shrinking from time to time especially if the correction turns into a bear market which often can last for months or even years. In worst case some investors start to sell at the bottom of the market, losing all the money their portfolio gained over possible years.

Fortunately there are solutions for this and one of the easiest one is to Swing Trade the market, trade the waves. It's not very hard to learn how to recognize stocks or other securities which are good candidates for swing trading. In a few weeks or a couple of month you can learn the basics of technical and fundamental analysis you need for Swing Trading and you can put it in work.

Swing trading will give you the opportunity to take advantage of the market volatility even if the price chart is nearly flat. You will notice that there are a lot of stocks where the long-term moving averages are nearly flat but prices move in a nice range. For the buy-and-hold strategy these stocks would be dead money but not for the Swing Trader.

I you want to test out your knowledge about Swing Trading before putting real money into the trades you can paper trade for a while until you feel confident. Once you feel comfortable you can start to trade leveraged financial instruments or derivatives on stocks or other financial instruments which are good candidates for Swing Trading making your trades even more profitable.

Of course you can learn on your own how to Swing Trade but sooner or later you will find out that you had to pay for the mistakes otherwise you could have avoided and sometimes it cost your entire trading account. It's always a good idea when you learn something new especially where there is risk involved to spend some money on education. Money spent on education, training is a good investment, money lost during careless trades is not a good investment and just makes you angry. There is nothing positive about it.